The present invention is related for systems for operating wind or water turbine farms, and in particular for operating a wind turbine farm.
Conditioning monitoring systems for wind turbine installations comprising multiple wind turbines collect relatively large amounts of data, including historical, SCADA, and real-time data.
It is difficult for the wind farm operator to extract and visualize key information contained in this data. The key information the wind farm operator needs is to do with the health of turbines and their components, and/or damage caused to turbines and their components.
For example, vibration analysis generally relies on a measurement provided by a sensor exceeding a predetermined threshold, which is prone to false alarms if the threshold is set too low. The threshold level is not necessarily constant and may vary with frequency (and hence speed). The presence of shocks and extraneous vibrations means that the threshold level must be set sufficiently high to minimize the risk of false-alarms. Furthermore, the threshold must be sufficiently high to avoid any negative effects caused by ‘creep’ in sensor performance which may occur over its lifetime. In addition, there is no discrimination between vibrations associated with failure or damage and those which are not indicative of failure or damage.